Simon Glover (Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam)
"The Second Stars"
The first generation of stars to form in the Universe -- the so-called
population III -- is widely believed to have had an initial mass
function (IMF) strongly biased towards high mass stars. The fact that
we have yet to observe a truly metal-free star is consistent with this
theoretical prediction. However, a number of stars with extremely low,
but non-zero metallicity are known, suggesting that the IMF of even
the earliest population II stars differed significantly from that of
population III stars. In this talk, I review the history of the idea
that it is the metal-enrichment of the gas that causes this change in
the IMF, and present some new results from high resolution
hydrodynamical simulations of early star formation that provide strong
support for this hypothesis.